Presently, car industry is growing rapidly at an average rate of 10 percent. In order to accommodate the large volume of vehicles, infrastructure of the cities such as road, flyovers, car parking and other facilities needs to be improved in the city. Lack of enough parking spaces near shopping centers, hospital, theater, railway station, airport etc., encourages the tendency to park car on the road side illegally which aggravate the traffic menace. Lots of money gets wasted in case of a theft or damage of vehicle when it parked unattended on the road side. Parking a car in busy parking lot in cities is a nightmare for senior citizens.
Conventionally, a multilevel car parking system is one of the options to decongest roads and solve parking problems associated with the above and to maximize the car parking capacity by utilizing vertical space, rather than expand horizontally. According to this method, driving ramps are provided to drive the vehicle to each level of parking. It is found that the ramp eat up much parking area that no increase in parking capacity is possible. Further, this system requires lot of space for maneuvering of cars while parking and retrieving. Moreover, the car has to move slowly due to sloppy ramps and to search for vacant parking bay, thereby resulting in burning lots of fuel and polluting the air. In addition, lots of time to be spend to find a vacant space and to park the car in available space. The car in the driving path should stop when somebody wants to take a car out from parked slot. In this scenario, height of each level should be much higher than the car height to accommodate the movement of passenger and driver. This system has an associated amount of overhead that must be accommodated such as pathways, lighting and air ventilation system for passengers and drivers, and security personnel to avoid theft.
Recently, automatic multilevel parking systems are developed and adopted to overcome the problem associated with conventional multilevel parking systems. In general, this system consists of pallets in which the cars are parked at entry point. The pallet along with car is then placed on a slider powered by electrical motor and moves horizontally to nearest lift mechanism. Then the slider transfers the pallet with car to the lift and the lift moves vertically to take the pallet to the desired level. Further the pallet is again transferred to another slider which takes the pallet to a designated spot and transfers the car to a desired slot. It has been observed that the process consumes a lot of time to transfer the cars between slider to lift, lift to slider and finally to slot. This leads to longer waiting time for a driver to store/retrieve a vehicle to/from the parking bay. And also in each level, this system requires motor powered sliders and guiding rails for sliders moving horizontally. This complicated system needs much man power for maintenance and initial cost will be high.
There therefore exists a need in the art to provide for an automatic multilevel parking system that not only reduces the time to park a vehicle but also to have low maintenance and cost effective system.